Philippine Pearl Double-Strand Necklace*The Met Store Best

Unique gifts for her.

This luminous double-strand necklace evokes a gold-and-pearl rosary made in the 17th–19th-century Philippines and now in The Met collection. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, Spanish missionaries traveled to the Philippines and brought with them, among many other Western traditions, the Catholic rosary: a string of beads used to count repetitions of prayers. These devotional beads assumed various sizes and forms, and continued to evolve until a basic design and sequence of prayers were standardized in the 15th century. In the Philippines, which notably boasts the second largest gold reserves in the world, many rosaries and tamborins—a type of Philippine necklace that combined the European rosary with pre-Hispanic and Asian visual concepts—were made of…See More